Somewhere out there
by emletish
Summary: The story of how Ursa finds herself and her children again.
1. Chapter 1

**Somewhere out there.**

In Ba Sing Se there is a woman with no name, who is in a recovery centre for former Joo Dees. She knows there is something she is missing. Something important tugs at her mind. She has forgotten something that she had to do. She has forgotten someone who needed her. They were so important to her. She longs for them even when her mind cannot remember them.

She can feel the big holes they have left in her heart.

How did she lose them? How did she lose herself?

She doesn't know who they are. She doesn't know who she herself is.

Ignorance is not always bliss.

Ignorance breaks her heart in to more pieces than she thought her heart contained.

* * *

The note had been waiting for Iroh, pressed inside one of his favourite books, a collection of wise proverbs and poems. The note fluttered out one day it early spring. It had been pressed between the quote "We may not be able to prepare the future for our children, but we can at least prepare our children for the future" and a poem about a ferry crossing. It had laid over a small passage for years, its ink smudging the words underneath.

The passage underneath the note:

_The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away;_  
_The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them;_  
_The certainty of others-the life, love, sight, hearing of others_

The note could have never known how it was tie between two people, like all appeals are.

It could not know that contained an important, impossible and yet oh so simple request.

It only knew that it had waited all these years to be found.

Iroh was doing a big clean out of his rooms, trying to de-clutter everything that he had let pile up in there. He had found so many lost treasures. The book was one. He thumbed the volume nostalgically. He used to be zealous about this book – gripped with a kind of religious fervour regarding it. He was convinced that if every single person in the world would read the book, the world would magically become a better place simply because the wisdom contained in the book. He had read it to Lu Ten almost every night as a child.

It had been too painful to even look at the book when he had first returned home.

Everything that reminded him of Lu Ten had felt like a knife in the heart then.

Now, so many years later, he had arrived at a place where the thought of Lu Ten made him want to smile instead of cry.

Now he picked up the book and lovingly ran his finger over the spine. The cover was worn from all the times he had read and reread it. On a whim he flicked it over and read a few passages that had always given him comfort.

The note fluttered down and came to rest against his left foot. It looked so innocuous on the floor. Iroh bent over to pick it up.

It just had one line.

The writing was messy as though it had been written in great haste. Still the handwriting was unmistakeable.

Iroh stared at the words on the page and felt, for the first time in a long time, like he was at a completely loss.

Two paths diverged before him. He didn't know which one to choose.

* * *

Zuko would do anything for news of his mother.

This note would just tear him up.

* * *

Iroh made his choice. He slipped the note into his pocket and said not a word to his nephew. He pretended that the ache in his chest was heart burn, and not the prick of disloyalty. He hadn't meant to lie. He really hadn't. He only ever wanted to best for his nephew. It was for the best really.

At first he tried to ignore the note. He tried to pretend he had never seen it, to lose it. Normally the task should have been simple. Iroh had lost many things in his life; battles, arguments, pai sho games. He'd lost his son. He'd lost his wife. He'd lost his birthright. He'd lost a mountain of knick knacks, a large fortune in small change, and more white lotus tiles than could be counted.

But for the life of him he couldn't lose the note.

He couldn't un-know what it said. What it meant.

The note said

_Please take care of my children. _

Iroh was not naïve. He had lived a full life. He had experienced exquisite joy and terrible sorrow. He had come to a very dark point in his life and had chosen to keep going…but he knew that not all people made the same choice.

He knew what happened to some people, when they felt surround by darkness and felt that they had no way forward, when all their bright memories grew dim and when they allowed despair to come and take root in their very being.

People normally only left notes with final requests when they…willingly took their leave.

He read and re-read the poem, which he had always found so life affirming, and found a new dark and sinister meaning.

_The current rushing so swiftly, and swimming with me far away…_

He thought about the strong currents under the high cliffs, loose ends, early deaths, a callously cruel man, a desperately unhappy princess. He thought about his brother's wife, Zuko's mother. He'd thought he'd known her so well. She hadn't seemed like the type…

But everyone has their breaking points.

There was a now a note in his pocket with a final request.

And the impossible task of telling Zuko ahead of him.

* * *

If Iroh had told Zuko as soon as he had found the note, they could have shared its discovery together. Now that he had waited, he found that even after he had made the decision to tell Zuko, there was still waiting to do. Iroh told himself that he was waiting for the right time, he wasn't being a coward. He was simply waiting for the best possible moment to break the worst possible news.

First the country was in far too much of a mess. He didn't want to add extra burdens to Zuko in a difficult time.

Then Katara was away studying, and Iroh wanted to wait until she got back. If Zuko reacted badly, as Iroh had every reason to suspect he would, then his nephew would want his girlfriend around.

Then it was nearly Azula's birthday.

Iroh had come to appreciate his niece more. In the years since the war, they had finally come to a more peaceful détente. Iroh had begun really _trying_ with her. Iroh thought it was probably a sad testament to his character that he only started _really trying_ after he found the note. It indicated that though he thought himself old and wise, there were still qualities that he lacked.

He poured so much energy into creating a wonderful, if low key, celebration for his Neice. She teased him terribly with her acerbic wit, mostly for being a sentimental old fool, but she'd smiled wider that day than he'd ever seen. He'd wanted to see her happy. If he had to make her desperately sad in the coming days, he wanted to at least see her smile first. Now he had.

Then he was out of excuses.

* * *

Notes:

Hello everyone! Much love to my lovely readers. I know it has been a while!

So this is the story of how Ursa is reunited with her family in my head canon. I know its off to a bummer start, but I promise it will get better.

So the poem that got mentioned here is crossing brooklyn ferry by Walt Whitman and it is lovely. The reading by Geoffery Wright is especially brilliant. I'll put that up on my tumblr in a bit. The quote is from F.D Roosevelt.

Next up we will see some of Azula's thoughts on her brother, her uncle and her missing mother.

Til then lovely readers...


	2. Chapter 2

-o-

Ummi

-0-

The woman with no name finally finds one.

Queen Song helps her.

The woman was initially mistrustful of Queen Song and all her helpful attempts at the clinic. She was sure there was an angle Queen Song was working, some sort of ulterior motive.

There always was with royalty, wasn't there?

-o-

Queen Song had an idea for the literate Joo Dees. She presented them with paper and ink and asked them to make their mark on the paper. Initials, names and sometimes titles and addresses flow onto the paper, with only a few prompting questions and the opportunity to write. Queen Song says that sometimes a signature becomes part of a person's muscle memory. These little details were stored in the hands, in the tissue and bone, in a place the Dai Li couldn't get to.

The Woman sees Queen Song's genuine joy when her idea produces results and trusts her a little more. She sees some of her old friends from the clinic, long term Joo Dees all of them, have their identities, lives and families returned to them. How easily they will slot back into their old lives, the woman cannot say, but she hopes that they easily do. She naively hopes that for her fellow former Joo Dees, going home will be like putting on a familiar part of slippers, comfortable and easy.

Then the day comes when Queen Song is sitting regally across from her at a table.

The woman looks at Queen Song carefully trying to gauge what sort of person she is. Is she helpful, insidious, kind? Doe she betray anything that could be of use to the woman? The woman always does this when she meets new people and that is perhaps very telling of the sort of person she is.

Song was quite a bold choice for King Kuei really. Normally that sort of choice in bride would earn him lots of public censure. Maybe it did. Someone had obviously put lots of time and effort into polishing up Queen Song, judging from how she looks now seated uncomfortably across from the woman, with everything about her, from her hair to her feet, elaborately adorned.

The woman remembers when the queen first arrived in Ba Sing Se and seemed perpetually half-frightened. The woman had felt for her then. How strange it must have been for the poor lass, coming from a remote and simple village to Ba Sing Se and instantly having to become part of the royal family, in a royal court that could be described as a viper pit. Poor Queen Song, then scarcely eighteen, bearing the scrutiny of everyone in a city where she couldn't tell who was her friend and who was her foe.

The woman was aware that the new Earth Queen was from common stock. Everyone in the Earth Kingdom was. Queen Song spent much of her time doing lots of charity work with the peasantry, the Joo Dees were just one of her many projects. Perhaps she preferred to be surrounded by people of her own class when she could help it.

The woman had never met Queen Song up close. She had watched her from a distance and longed to help her. She wanted to tell Queen Song that it would get easier – the homesickness, the feeling of being perpetually watched, all that got easier to bear in time. The woman didn't know how she knew, but she was sure.

Queen Song smiles and makes nice small talk. The weather mostly. It has been unseasonably hot in Ba Sing Se recently. The heat makes the woman's skin itch with something that feels like anticipation. Then Queen Song says "sign here please" and passes a sheet of paper over the table casually. She doesn't make a big fuss or fill the occasion with any gravitas and that nonchalance eases the woman's nerves somewhat. It makes it easy to take the paper and ink and write.

The first character flows out easily, it is a U.

But then she hesitates on the second. Her first impulse was to write an R, but then she also felt compelled to write an M. Then she cannot for the life of her think what would come after either of those letters.

She feels frustration and disappointment both. She had been hoping for a name, a clue, and place to start at least. She wanted to have a thread of an idea to hold onto. Maybe it could've led her back to who she was and where she started from.

Queen Song senses her disappointment. She optimistically says "Well your name starts with a U. Lots of fine names start with a U."

Sometime later the woman decides her name is Ummi.

Ummi. She turns the name over in her head. It feels almost right.

It is the name of the eternally faceless woman, Avatar Koruk's doomed paramor. Poor Ummi with her stolen face. She suffered because of her husband's ineptitude. She had her identity taken from her as surely as the woman had lost hers.

Besides the woman has to start calling herself _something._ There is nothing more peculiar or disturbing than only having a patient number to identify you. The woman feels more **solid** and **real **with a name to call herself by. She feels less lost at sea.

So Ummi it will be.

For all she knows, Ummi may actually be her name.

Her name starts with a U after all.

It starts with a U and that have given her the first grasp of that thread.

It is something at least.

-o-

Sometimes Azula runs away. She's good at escaping. She tries not to do it when Ming is working, because she doesn't want Ming to get in trouble. She never does it if Zuko or Ty Lee are away. There wouldn't be much point in running away then.

Azula knows, deep down, that she only really runs away to see if they would care enough to look for her. She sometimes tried to make them understand that she doesn't do it to worry them or hurt them. It is just that she feels a perverse pleasure in watching and hearing them look for her. Just knowing that someone _would_ look for her, not because she was important to some scheme or because of her position, but because they cared about her and worried…that eases something tight and coiled and angry in Azula's chest.

Her little expeditions sometimes help her make sense of things. Sometimes she is just so pissed off that the only other option is to storm off. She's pissed off now. That is the reason for this storm off. If she needed to think then she normally went to her mother's room. But this afternoon she just started running and ended up here accidentally.

It was bloody Dr Jung and his stupid obsession with her mother. He seemed to think that Azula's relationship with her mother had a big subconscious effect on her. He thought taking that relationship out and examining it in the light would help Azula get a better grasp on her sanity.

Azula thought this was just bollocks.

Yeah, she got why he would think that. Most people thought that mum disappearing was a big ingredient in Azula's particular brew of insanity. But she wasn't, Azula reckoned. If Azula was beef noodle soup, then mum going missing was probably one of the spices, or the lime or maybe the chilli. She wasn't the noodles though. Certainly not the beef.

Dr Jung couldn't get that through his head though. Today he had gone on about it and Azula's "unresolved issues" and Azula had stormed off. Azula couldn't make him understand that it was just pointless to think about Mum. She'd been gone for so long now, what good would thinking on her do?

Fat lot of good sitting around and feeling sad about mums ever did anyone in Azula's opinion.

She had gotten to the point where her Mum was like…a missing money bag or maybe a really nice set of earrings that'd been misplaced. It was constantly in the back of her mind. She couldn't quite concentrate on anything else because she just wanted to know what had happened to the earrings. But it didn't fill her day anymore. She wasn't consumed by it. She didn't feel tied to her mother the way that Bossy felt tied to hers.

See that was one of the good things about seeing more of Uncle Iroh. Azula probably wouldn't have had the words to describe that faint pulling feeling she got around certain people until he gave them to her.

Uncle and Azula were better now. They'd been having lots of chats lately and she'd gotten _wicked_ at Pai sho. He wasn't so bad really. He'd thrown her a lovely birthday party actually, and that had been nice because previously she hadn't thought he really cared. She thought he was just putting up with her for Zuko's sake. He was stark raving bonkers, but Azula wasn't going to judge anyone for that.

They'd had a chat the other day about these invisible bonds, sort of ropes that tied people together. Uncle was coming at it from a spirit-world angle and trying to encourage her to form sturdier bonds with the people around her.

But she got what he was getting at – with the ropes thing. Everyone was tied to other people, Azula could see that. Iroh had been tied so tightly to Lu Ten that a part of him died with her beautiful cousin. Bossy was tied to her mother still, even though her mother had died years and years ago and that was why she acted so motherly herself really – it was the ghost of her mum coming through the rope. Bossy had told her that though she'd resented having to take over all her mum's chores as a kid, it had actually helped her feel closer to the dead woman.

Azula could see Uncle's point about avoiding being tied to dead people and the painful way that broken bond coiled in the heart.

Zuko was a bit of a slut about who he tied himself to. He was tied to so many people, or maybe many people were tied to him. He was all tangled up in a big, disgustingly smushy loveknot with Bossy. He was tied to Iroh like Uncle was a life raft in the tempestuous waters of the running a kingdom. He was tied to all the people in the kingdom and felt oh-so-responsible for them. On top of all that he decided to tie himself to Azula too. He was also probably bonkers for this. But that was okay, bonkers was a family trait after all.

She didn't know if he felt tied to their mother too. He probably did.

Azula had thought she wasn't tied to her mum. She'd hacked away at all the bonds and started running away from everything about that woman, during what mum had referred to her as her rebellious years, only to feel that twig of the rope snap her back on her arse.

Then she'd been tied to her dad with a rope that had only been six inches long and had slowly been killing her. But she'd learned to love that and craved nothing else but his approval until he didn't even need a rope to keep her in line. It had been just the two of them for so long and both of them just thought they were tied together by _something,_ but then when push came to shove and everything feel apart, there hadn't ever been anything there at all.

The whole time in the background her rope with her mother had been there. But it wasn't like how Bossy felt about her mother. Bossy's mum was good and properly and tragically dead, but bossy remembered her so clearly and that gave her something to latch her rope onto. Azula's mum was agni-knew-where. She wasn't _solid _or_ real_ at the moment. That was useless state of affairs really. What good was it being tied to her when she was just floating around out there, with no one knowing what happened to her and being a bit useless really, at the whole mum thing.

If Azula was going to be tied to anyone, it probably should be Zuko, not mum. Mostly because he hadn't locked her up and thrown away the key or even thrown in the towel and given up on her, when it came right down to it. Sure he'd get hacked off at her, and they fight and he'd storm off dramatically, but he'd always come back. She'd been confused at first and it had taken her a while to accept that he wasn't going to just abandon her, even after…everything. It was ridiculously stupid, misplaced familial loyalty, but there was a solidity to it that Azula needed.

She was still wary about being tied to anyone really, because it never works out well. But Dr Jung seemed to think that the two of them repairing their relationship was the best way forward for her. She could latch herself to Zuko and hopefully he could help pull her out of the muddle she'd gotten herself into.

Azula didn't know if this was a great idea. She didn't know if one person could really save another.

-o-

She was smelling her mum's perfume over and over again when Zuko finally finds her. She only has to take one look at his face to know that something awful has happened. She knew that this was why Uncle had been trying to encourage her to _let go._ He knew how much this feeling hurt.

Zuko hugs her for what feels like the first time in a hundred years. She lets him for the first time in a million years. He's real and solid and there for her, but it is not enough to soften this blow. She feels the taste of iron and sour lemons seep into her mouth at his words. She could feel what Ming called her strange fits of passion coming on.

-o-

She'd always thought her mother was still alive somehow. She'd always secretly hoped that one day in the far away future, that woman would come back and hold her and love her and save her from her life.

She shouldn't have known. He story was never going to be _that _sort of story.

* * *

Rambly notes:

Lovely readers - thank you for reading and as always huge enormous thank you to all my reviewers!

Just to clarify, this story is set a 3-4 years after the stalking series.

I think that Azula has a long road of recovery ahead of her at the end of the series and in my head canon she is allowed to recover with some dignity. I just can't see Zuko metaphorically locking her up and throwing away the key. I know Bryke disagree with me - but I disagree with pretty much everything they've done post ATLA, so its much of a muchness really. I might take this piss out of some of the more ridiculous parts. Ummi might want to be an actress, who knows? but otherwise this story will steer faaaar away from canon.

So Ursa has named herself Ummi mostly because she needed a name. She needed something to help identify her before she could start to move on in the world. there'd be nothing more dehumanizing than only having a number to call yourself by. I picked Ummi because I thought that would fit nicely. Ummi has her...well everything from the looks of it taken away by Koh just to spite her husband. Poor tragic Ummi. But I felt like Ursa could understand how it felt to lose your identity.

Random note: so previously ATLA had badass lady avatars who did their job well - Kyoshi and Yang Chen and then fail-whale male Avatars who bollocks everything up Kuruk and Roku. but Lok has made out that Korra will continue the proud tradition of fail-whale avatars.

So Azula, I think is actually nearly ready to leave her institution at this point. she still has bad days but they are much less frequent and her therapy really is helping, even if it does cause her to storm off. However I think that Azula might be reluctant to leave the institution, which is a safe space for her, and return to the palace to live with Zuko. She's not fully there yet.

For those of you wondering how Azula and Zuko have gotten along during the intervening years, I recommend reading the christmas fic I wrote last year "Avatar Christmas Carol" - it's not part of the stalking series pers se, because I don't think the ATLA world celebrates christmas, but it kind of nicely encapsulates how I think Azula relates to those around her.

Next up we will see what Zuko thinks of all this, a bit of his relationship with Katara and how that has evolved, and a conversation with Ozai. Til then my lovelies.


End file.
